Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Data sharing is made difficult by problems allocating and distributing costs,
but institutional and political issues related to participation play a sizeable
role as well. While there is no conclusive evidence that charging for GI pro-
vides enough revenue to recover the costs and maintenance of the GI, nor
even the costs of managing the system for regulating use and charging, most
administrations around the world continue to charge, even in cases of use by
other administrative agencies. People voice concerns about paying for the
data necessary to assure public safety as well as civil and environmental pro-
tection and administrative budgetary concerns, but the developments of SDI
have been greatly impaired by cost recovery. SDI remains one of the key con-
cepts guiding developments of GI. How individual regions and countries
address the challenges is an important question for the future of GI and car-
tography.
Digital Libraries
Work on digital libraries addressed a very important source of information
for society: public libraries remain great repositories of information and
offer support for knowledge economy activities that find little support else-
where. Compared to traditional map libraries, digital map libraries offer
some capabilities that are of great benefit to many users of GI and maps.
The key difference is that digital map libraries combine both paper maps
and GI.
This can occur through the scanning of existing paper maps (when pos-
sible) and their storage in a digital format. Even with referencing to a coordi-
nate system, scanned paper maps are still cumbersome in comparison to GI.
However, when copyright laws allow it, scanning provides a straightforward
way to collect information. Digital libraries of GI also support novel methods
for accessing GI that reflect the complexity and the variability of how people
work with and use GI and maps. Digital libraries can distribute the physical
storage of GI to different sites. The possibility also exists of accessing infor-
mation from multiple sites for digital libraries. A person accessing a univer-
sity digital library of GI and maps may transparently access GI and maps
from other university libraries.
Digital Earth
Proposed in the late 1990s and recently developed as a commercial software
application by Google, Digital Earth permits a person anywhere in the world
to access GI for any place on the earth, at variable scales and resolutions, via
the Internet. Its relevance for administrations working with GI are limited,
but it certainly is important for agencies involved in global issues and for pro-
viding three-dimensional visualizations of many areas of the earth.
Digital Earth also exists as a specification for the global georeferencing
of GI. This mainly supports global environmental research, but it is clearly a
useful reference framework for a much larger number of uses.
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